Salary Survey Extra: Deep Focus on SAS Certified Base Programmer

Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our annual Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

With last week’s kickoff to our 2018 Deep Focus series, we started at the top. So to balance the scales, we’ve retreated to the south forty of the Salary Survey 75 for this week’s installment. The data analytics firm SAS is one of the most venerable companies in the red hot Big Data realm, with roots that go all the way back to 1966.

The SAS Certified Base Programmer credential, No. 70 in this year’s Salary Survey 75 list, is the first credential in what the SAS Global Certification Program has labeled its Foundation Tools tier. So if you’re looking for a good place to jump in and find out what data analytics is all about, then this would likely be an excellent starting point.

Here’s what the salary picture looks like SAS Certified Base Programmer holders who responded to the Salary Survey:

All U.S. Respondents Average Annual Salary: $86,560 Median Annual Salary: $85,000How satisfied are you with your current salary? Completely Satisfied: 3.1 percent Very Satisfied: 31.3 percent Satisfied: 37.5 percent Not Very Satisfied: 28.1 percent Not At All Satisfied: [No responses]

All Non-U.S. Respondents Average Annual Salary: $40,200 Median Annual Salary: $20,000How satisfied are you with your current salary? Completely Satisfied: 3.7 percent Very Satisfied: 3 percent Satisfied: 34 percent Not Very Satisfied: 49.3 percent Not At All Satisfied: 10 percent

The largest single body of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders in the survey is made up of U.S. residents (51.6 percent of those surveyed), but we also got a strong response from India (22 percent) and gleaned further participation from nine other countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, and Taiwan.

It’s worth pausing a moment to take note of the next item in our rundown: A flat-out astonishing 36.6 percent of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders who responded to our survey are women. We’ve done a handful of Deep Focus features that didn’t include data from a single female respondent, and most of the time ratio of men to women is 9 to 1 or higher. So SAS Global Certification has tapped into something — interest from females — that a great many certification programs would love to discover.

In addition to be unusually feminine, our pool of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders is also unusually youthful. (This makes SAS Global Certification 2 for 2 in rounding up the much-desired unicorns of the IT certification realm: first women, and now young people.) An eye-opening 14.1 percent of those surveyed are between the ages of 19 and 24, nearly 40 percent (39.4 to be exact) are between the ages of 25 and 34, and 23.9 percent are between the ages of 35 and 44. The geezers of the group are those between the ages of 45 and 54 (12. percent) and those between the ages of 55 and 64 (9.9 percent).

SAS Certified Base Programmer holders tend to be a remarkably well educated bunch, with the highest level of education attained by most being either a master’s degree (53.5 percent of those surveyed) or bachelor’s degree (35.4 percent). The outliers are the 4.2 percent of credential holders who have technical training (but no college degree), the 2.8 percent who have doctorates, the 1.3 percent who have professional degrees (such as a juris doctor), and the 1.8 percent who are currently in school.

Full-time employment among SAS Certified Base Programmer holders is solid at 87.3 percent, with 4.4 percent of those surveyed holding part-time jobs, and 4.1 percent presently out of work. (The rest are either students or on sabbatical.) Among those who have jobs, most either put in a standard 40-hour work week (43.5 percent of those surveyed) or are slightly overworked with a weekly schedule of between 41 and 50 hours (36.2 percent). The rest either work more than 50 hours per week (5.8 percent of those surveyed), between 31 and 39 hours per week (11.6 percent), or 30 or fewer hours (2.9 percent).

As you might expect given the relative youthfulness of our survey population, most of the SAS Certified Base Programmer holders we heard from fill up the lower echelons at their workplaces, with 33.7 percent of those surveyed in rank-and-file employee roles, while 30.1 percent are specialists, and 21.8 percent are senior specialists. SAS Certified Base Programmer holders are, it would seem, much harder to find in management roles, with 12 percent of those surveyed serving as managers, and a bare pittance employed as either directors (1.3 percent) or executives (1.1 percent).

Most SAS Certified Base Programmer holders are relative newcomers. A whopping 39.7 percent of those surveyed have worked in a role that directly utilizes one or more of their certified skills for between zero years (1 to 11 months) and two years, while 28.9 percent have been doing it between 3 and 5 years, 12 percent have been in the game for between 6 and 8 years, and 9.6 percent have been cranking away for between 9 and 10 years. The rest, just 9.8 percent of those surveyed, have been plying their certified skills for more than a decade.

Finally, here’s the view of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders on key questions from the survey about how certification impacts job performance:

At my current job I use skills learned or enhanced through certification: Several times a day: 43.4 percent Several times a week: 22.9 percent Several times a month: 8.4 percent Occasionally: 18.1 percent Rarely: 7.2 percent

Comment:

How many people did you survey? Was you sample representative of the population of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders? If it wasn’t, then these percents don’t really mean anything. For example, if you surveyed 1000 SAS Certified Base Programmer holders out of the total 100,000 (just making up numbers for the sake of the example), then that 87.3 percent full-time employment among SAS Certified Base Programmer holders is misleading and potentially inaccurate.